Bird Vocalization Classification
I have been extremely lucky to have been a part of the Caples Creek Forest Resiliance project, which aims to understand the effects of prescribed fire on the forest ecosystem. The goal of this project is to understand the effects of prescribed fire on bird populations by surveying 82 points before and after the prescribed burn. Measuring bird populations is no easy task. Traditionally, researchers would conduct point counts, which involve going to a location and recording every bird (seen and heard) for a set amount of time (10 minutes in our case). Six years ago, in 2018, we hoped to take the next step in bird conservation research by automating the process of data collection.
Autonomous recording units (ARUs) are devices that record audio. We deployed 28 ARUs and rotated them between the 82 points. They recorded audio for 15 minutes every 30 minutes, from 4:00 PM to 10:15 AM (the middle of the day has little bird activity). With this much data, it would be impossible for a human to listen to all of it. We needed a way to automatically classify bird vocalizations.